1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to data storage systems, and more particularly to apparatus, method and computer program product embodiments for facilitating data retention without requiring additional backup or data movement operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data backups are mechanisms well known in the industry that are used to allow users to restore their data due to failure of a component, human error, software corruption, or some other type of disaster. Data backup and archive procedures are implemented to solve two basic problems—data protection against hardware, software and human failure and data retention for reference or audit purposes. The former type of protection is typically short term, i.e., data is retained so that a file or system can be recovered to a point-in-time to some point within the recent past, usually within some number of weeks. The latter is usually long term, e.g., data has to be retained and remain accessible for several years. A data protection model might be retention of daily backups for two weeks (i.e., 12 copies of data representing each work day and one weekend for two weeks), an additional set of backups made on the weekends to be retained for a period of two months (beyond the daily backups), and finally a set of backups made at the end of each month to be retained for long term archival for several years (beyond the weekly backups).